This panoramic aerial view of the New Orleans lakefront was taken by Leon Trice Photography in March 1958. It shows the massive expanse of land reclaimed from Lake Pontchartrain by the Orleans Levee Board in the 1920s and 1930s. The project produced a seawall and a beautiful recreational park immediately adjacent to Lake Pontchartrain. Just beyond the park area was additional new land that gave rise to several neighborhoods: Lake Vista (1936), Lakeshore (1951), Lake Terrace (1953), and Lake Oaks (1964, after this photograph was taken).

The photograph shows, at the bottom, the New Orleans Municipal Yacht Harbor and the Southern Yacht Club, West End Park, and the yet-to-be developed New Orleans Marina (the City of New Orleans gave its rights to that property to the Orleans Levee Board in 1958). Just above those more or less public properties is the Lakeshore neighborhood and the still under construction shopping center at West End and Robert E. Lee Boulevards. Beyond that is the older Lake Vista section with its own shopping area actually in the center of the neighborhood (at Bayou St. John and the Lake is the old Coast Guard station at the "Old Beach"). Across the Bayou is the then still-developing Lake Terrace neighborhood (none of the Lakeshore Drive mansions had yet been erected).

The old Naval Air Station, soon to reopen as Louisiana State University in New Orleans, still shows the remnants of its runways; its barracks and other buildings served as the first home to the fledgling University. On the Lake across from the Air Station is Pontchartrain Beach and, to its right, the open land that would become Lake Oaks. Beyond the industrial buildings along Franklin Avenue is Camp Leroy Johnson, now UNO's east campus. To the immediate right of the old Camp is the incipient Pontchartrain Park development. Across the Industrial Canal is Lakefront Airport and the vast area of mostly vacant land that would soon become New Orleans East.

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